What kills a boomer business? Community.
(and what to do about it)
At first glance, it may seem like legacy companies and their upstart competitors are chasing completely different things. But in reality, they’re not. The needs of established businesses and the needs of startups are surprisingly aligned: both want growth, efficiency, and customer loyalty.
The real difference lies in how they go about achieving these outcomes—and more importantly, in what incumbents are willing to neglect.
One of the most common blind spots is personalized attention to existing clients. Established businesses often assume their size, track record, and brand are enough to keep clients around. That assumption is exactly what allows newer startups to wedge their way into the market and begin siphoning away customers, often without the incumbent realizing what’s happening until it’s too late.
This isn’t speculation. It’s a playbook. At startup incubators like Y Combinator, founders are explicitly trained to find these wedges and exploit them. They’re taught to identify where big companies grow complacent, to attack those weak points with laser precision, and to build disruptive momentum from there.
If incumbents want to survive, they need to pay attention.
Why Community is the Ultimate Lock-In
One of the simplest and most cost-effective defenses against disruption is cultivating community. Building a community around your product or service creates some of the strongest lock-in imaginable—and compared to other strategic investments, it costs very little.
Consider Apple.
Every year, Apple hosts WWDC, its Worldwide Developers Conference. On the surface, it’s a technical event for developers. But look closer, and you’ll see it’s one of the most powerful community-building tools in business.
Developers walk away not only with knowledge, but with a renewed sense of loyalty. They feel valued, seen, and inspired. Apple, in turn, gets mindshare—every single year, for over two decades. The result? It becomes almost unthinkable for a developer to suddenly prioritize Android, even when Android is innovating faster in certain areas.
This is the key point: innovation alone doesn’t guarantee loyalty. Community does.
Lessons from Healthcare’s Quiet Giant
I saw this firsthand when I worked at Epic, the largest B2B healthtech company in the world.
Epic’s software runs 100% of the top 20 hospitals in America and over 80% of all hospitals nationwide.
Inside their campus bathrooms, plastered across the walls, is a simple mantra: “Perception = Reality.”
Epic lives by this principle.
Sure they provide software; but really their secret is in how they cultivate relationships. Their annual User Group Meeting (UGM) isn’t just a conference—it feels more and more like a festival each year (with costumes and amusements all part and parcel of the show!) Epic invests heavily in making it a can’t-miss event, even once flying out client executives from a financially distressed hospital to ensure their attendance.
Why? Because they also understand what Apple also understands: longitudinal relationships are everything.
Bringing clients together year after year creates a sense of belonging, loyalty, and shared identity. And when your business is interwoven with a client’s community, you’re no longer just a vendor—you’re indispensable.
The Wake-Up Call for Incumbents
The message for incumbents is clear: disruption doesn’t come out of nowhere. It starts in the gaps you leave behind. Personalized attention and community-building aren’t just nice-to-haves—they’re existential defenses against competitors eager to pry open cracks in your armor.
Startups are trained to look for wedges. I can tell you this because I am a 25 year old medical student who works with startups on a weekly basis for the past 2 years and will inevitably build one myself soon too. I am telling you point-blank, unless you figure this out, your business is probably one of the boomer businesses most likely to be disrupted by the folks I meet on a regular basis. We’ve all seen how quickly some startups can topple incumbents— I implore you to look for the pattern, but if you want to save yourself the time, just take my word for it.
If you’re an incumbent, your job is to close these wedges before anyone else gets the chance to Trojan Horse your market. Build communities. Show up consistently. Make your clients feel like insiders, not just account numbers.
In the end, perception really is reality. And if your clients perceive that you’ve stopped caring, the reality will be that they’re already halfway out the door.